Constitutional Watch: “Christian Legal Society v. Martinez - The Supreme Court Just Doesn’t Get It | Eastern NC Now

    The most important factor for me in any Presidential election is whether the candidate will have the opportunity or not to nominate someone to the Supreme Court. If so, I make sure I know what my candidate stands for and whether he is likely to nominate someone with integrity and someone who will follow the Constitution rather than try to change it. After all, a decision from the Supreme Court will affect my children, their children, and additional generations as well. And the way things are going, we Americans don’t know if we can truly count on the rights and liberties we assumed we had. Just look at the Court’s decision on gun control this month (July 2010) in McDonald. In a very divided and very close decision (5-4), the Supreme Court held that yes, good and decent citizens have the right to bear arms to protect themselves from the threat of violent crime. But that majority could have easily been 5-4 in the opposite direction and we could have lost this very precious right. We all could have told by our states and local governments that we don’t have the right to own a gun and we could have been left helpless to watch violent crime continue to rise and take note that while we don’t have the right, as good and decent citizens, to own guns, the ability for the bad guys to get guns knows no bounds. So let’s rejoice this year for this great decision and enjoy this fundamental right while it still lasts. The next Justice to step down will give the President at that time the opportunity to appoint a replacement, and if it’s someone like Barack Obama or another liberal-minded individual, that new replacement may very well help craft the Court to deny that very right the next instance it comes up for review. I urge everyone to be ever eternally vigilante.

    Whether you believe it or not, the bad decisions of the Court do have very real and measureable consequences on our lives. For example, when the Supreme Court ordered that religion be taken out of our public schools in 1963 (with the Abington decision), violent crime increased 700%. Within no time, metal detectors and dedicated police officers have become part of the normal landscape and experience of our children and grandchildren’s education. In fact, crime jumped so high among junior high students that the federal government, for the first time ever, began to track murders, assaults, and rapes committed by students ages 10-14 (and since they have been so numerous, these crimes have been tracked individually). A young male who had attended a local high school in Greenville gunned down a promising young ECU student and a young pizza parlor manager last summer in the downtown area for no other reason other than to express his anger. Similarly, when religion was taken out of public schools in 1963, teenage pregnancies immediately soared to over 700%. The United States now boasts the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. Similarly, sexually transmitted diseases among students began to skyrocket. It has reached the levels that have never been documented in our country before. The reason? Promiscuous sexual activity among high school students. The removal of religion has been accompanied by the highest crime rate and the greatest decline in morality that this country has ever seen. But you don’t have to believe me. You can check with the US Department of Health and Human Services (and state departments), as well as with the Center for Disease Control.

    The effects of the Court’s decisions touches some more than others, but one thing is for sure, life today is not as simple and straightforward as it used to be. Children used to start their day with a prayer or moment of silence to thank their God for the many blessings in their lives and recognize the Golden Rule. They often walked to school because it was in their neighborhood and they plugged away at their studies until they graduated (or joined the military). They ate dinner with their Mom and Dad, shared stories about their day, and again thanked their God for their many blessings. Their childhoods were happy and wholesome. Many policies are counterintuitive and we often struggle to understand why we must follow them. Then we find out that we have to because the Supreme Court said so and now it’s the law of the land. Years ago there were traditional roles we filled and our society was ordered and productive. It’s quite the opposite these days. I feel sorry for children who have to grow up without proper guidelines and boundaries and without the traditional role models to follow as most of us had when we grew up. I can’t imagine how confused they must be to see traditional boundaries so utterly blurred. How can they possibly know what is right and what is wrong and what is productive and what is not? It’s almost as if our government and our Court goes out of their way to make it harder for families to raise decent and morally-sound children who can navigate themselves properly through all the social crap that our nation has embraced. Consider what the Colorado State Board of Education wrote after the horrific shooting at Columbine High by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold: “As we seek the why behind this infamous event, we must find answers beyond the easy and obvious. How weapons become used for outlaw purposes is assuredly a relevant issue, yet our society’s real problem is how human behavior sinks to utter and depraved indifference to the sanctity of life. As our country promotes academic literacy, we must promote moral literacy as well…. Our tragedy is but the latest – albeit most terrifying and costly – of a steadily escalating series of schoolhouse horrors that have swept across the nation. The senseless brutality of those calamities clearly reveals that a dangerous subculture of amoral violence has taken hold among many of our youth…. We must remember, respect, and unashamedly take pride in the fact that our schools, like our country, found their origin and draw their strength from the faith-based morality that is at the heart of our national character. Today our schools have become so fearful of affirming one religion or one value over another that they have banished them all. In doing so they have abdicated their historic role in the moral formation of youth and thereby alienated themselves from our people’s deep spiritual sensibilities. To leave this disconnection between society and its schools unaddressed is an open invitation to further divisiveness and decline. For the sake of our children, who are so dependent upon a consistent and unified message from the adult world, we must solve these dilemmas… Perhaps across the ages we can hear the timeless words of Abraham Lincoln, and, applying them to our own circumstance, renew his pledge ‘that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.’ With history as our judge, let us go forward together with a strong and active faith.”

    Going forward please realize that while you can’t vote directly for Supreme Court Justices who will make firm decisions affecting your rights and the rights of future generations, those who you vote for do have that grant of power. It’s an awesome yet fearsome power. Our lives are shaped by the freedoms we have and the extent to which we can exercise them. At this point in our history, whether our rights will be upheld or regulated is a virtual crapshoot. The President of the United States holds that power in his hand. We must not give that power to the wrong individual.

    As one time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork warned: “In a constitutional democracy, the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.”



Citations:

Christian Legal Society Chapter of the Univ. of Calif., Hastings College of Law, aka, Hastings Christian Fellowship v. Martinez, 561 U. S. (2010)

Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819 (1995)

Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609 (1984)]

United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644, pp. 654–655 (1929)

Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972)

Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47 (2006)

Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000)

New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)

Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479 (1960)

Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958) (quoting Chief Justice Earl Warren on the “evolving standards of decency…”)

Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952) [Justice Douglas states that there must be no hostility to religion]

Abington v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)